Singing at the Oratoire

On Sunday afternoon, our choir sang here. This is the Oratoire St-Joseph, a huge Roman Catholic shrine and basilica on the side of our local mountain, Mont Royal, overlooking the north-western side of the city.

This was the view in the early afternoon, before our rehearsal began. Starting at the parking lot far below this terrace at the top of the building are sets of steps, which pilgrims climb up on their knees. I walked up, but once inside the building I used the escalator — the most devout go all the way aux genoux. Below the main sanctuary is another chapel, and a shrine room filled with high banks of flickering votive candles, and the crutches of those who believed themselves to be healed by Brother André, founder of this shrine to St. Joseph. Brother André, credited with two "official" miracles but believed by millions to have healed many more, was made Saint André by the pope last year, and the Oratory — whose grandeur I doubt that simple man could have ever imagined — is a site of pilgrimage for people from all over the world and one of the most-visited sites in Montreal.

The occasion was a service celebrating 40 years of dialogue between Roman Catholics and Anglicans, and it was mainly about and for the clergy who have been involved with this mutual listening project over the years. We had been asked by the Bishop of Montreal to represent the Anglicans, and we sang both separately and together with Les Petits Chanteurs, the boys' choir  resident at the Oratory.

Along with the  clergy, we robed in a huge sacristy to the side of the main altar. This is part of our group, getting ready off in one corner of the room.

There were bishops. Lots of bishops.

I quite like the design of the Oratory; some don't. It's very modern, and feels Germanic, which is perhaps odd for Montreal where most of the Catholic churches are ornate, French, and rather baroque. This building has a number of large expressionist wood carvings, extremely beautiful ironwork (the central grille in the photo below, for instance, and you can see some candle stands at the bottom far left), many glittering mosaics (on either side of the grille) and a gigantic organ.

Here's the boys' choir rehearsing; we were seated beyond them on those semicircular benches, behind the crucifix in front of the grille. That rod and semi-circle at the left are a suspension system holding a number of tiny microphones.

They sang Bruckner's "Locus iste," a great piece; they sang the notes well, but (it seemed to me) without much conviction or feeling. We sang a Magnificat and a big Victorian number for double choir, "Hail Gladdening Light," by Charles Wood. In the Oratory's acoutsic, it was quite thrilling to hear our voices, and their overtones, reverberating for many seconds after we had finished the last chord.

And here's the view when I left after the service, around 6:00 pm. I walked down, and by the time I reached my car my knees were protesting a lot! Down a mountain is always worse, for me, than up — somehow I don't think Saint Andre will be fixing my old ski injuries anytime soon. But one of the great pleasures of singing in this choir is the occasional chance to perfom in different venues and circumstances; this was fun.

Drawing My Life, 20 Years Ago

While searching for something else, I came across an old sketchbook today. It's from 1990, during the last real period of intensive artwork. There were a few oil paintings in the next ten years, but not much searching. It was fascinating to me to look back through these, now, and try to remember what I was doing and thinking then.

There were some nice gesture drawings of our dear departed cat, Madonna.

 

And some drawings I was obviously thinking about in terms of paintings or graphics. During this period I did some very free but intense watercolors that had a lot to do with memories, emotions.  There's a drawing in this book of our neighbor's old willow tree, with stars shining through it — that became a painting, which I recently found in a drawer and pinned up on my studio wall. I never used these sketches, below, but that's what they were for.

And toward the end of the sketchbook I was stunned to see this ghostly face, very pale, on the back of a sheet.

At the bottom, in pencil, it says "my mother, from memory, after her visit, 5/14/90."

My mother was an artist who didn't keep at it very much after marriage, but she loved the arts — all of them — and encouraged me from the moment I was old enough to hold a pencil or put my hands on a keyboard. Looking at her face today I felt sorry I've let so many years go by without drawing or painting, but I know she'd be glad that I'm doing it now. There was a reason, and it appeared on the very last pages of this sketchbook: the first poems I wrote when I was just starting to think seriously about writing instead.

I wasn't quite forty then – I turned 38 in September, 1990 – and I was discouraged with art, and, I think, lonely — I wanted to talk with people and to communicate more than I wanted to sit in a studio after days at my desk and worktable doing graphic design. So much happened in that next ten or twelve years, before blogging! So much intensity and confusion, when everything about myself felt so fragmented and disconnected…and then learning to meditate, returning to the piano and doing some years of very serious study, and most importantly, finding my voice as a writer. Now it seems as if I've had to come back to fine art through the other arts, which have taught me so much about myself. It's rather like taking a circuitous walk in the woods and then returning home through back door. But it makes me happy now to discover seeds in these earlier drawings that are bearing fruit now, so much more easily.

Autumn, Hüzün

Today, it has arrived, for sure. The breeze fluttering the white bedroom curtains was cool, almost cold, and for the first time in months I put on my fleece jacket for the ride up to the studio.

Last night I walked home around 6 pm. It was still warm, and raining lightly, but the air and the light had changed; unmistakable. I went down rue Cartier past the community vegetable garden, where I startled a fat black cat, and caught him in my lens, and then across Marie-Anne and down de Bordeaux. On the walls of Ecole Jeanne-Mance ivy was growing in ovoid patterns like poplars, and I ended up walking around the empty building, where only a few lights shone in upper windows — a custodian working late in a hallway, perhaps — taking photographs. The dated concrete structure and grassy, man-made berms planted with ornamental grasses reminded me of the Olympic stadium, a few kilometers to the east: a combination of abandonment and extensiveness that carried within its neglect and decay the sound of crowds, of young voices, and the way the hectares of poured concrete were slowly being cracked by the roots and climbing fingers of living things.

This school had once been the parochial school for Eglise Immaculée-Conception, which stands in front of it facing Papineau Boulevard, one side now shrouded in green netting and criss-crossed with scaffoding for the construction of a new roof. I waited for the light and crossed into the park, where I entered the trees.

(the sign in the second picture in the series above reads "Entrée des élèves: Students' entrance")

Today, while working on a large design job with a lot of tedious details, I decided to listen to some music, and put on my headphones. For several seemingly unrelated reasons, Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde has come into my consciousness in the past few days. I don't own a recording, and spent a bit of time reading recommendations. Eventually I listened to an old one, on YouTube: Leonard Bernstein conducting the Israel Symphony Orchestra, with the magnificent Christa Ludwig, contralto, and René Kollo, tenor. My first Mahler recording was the 1st symphony, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. That was when I was young myself, full of the emotion and excitement I heard in Mahler's music. Now — approaching autumn — Mahler touches me for different reasons. After I listened to all of the movements — Ludwig's haunting "Ewig…ewig…" at the end of "Der Abschied/The Farewell" — I read the original Chinese poems from which Mahler adapted his text, and then the text itself. The poet waits for his friend to arrive, the friend to whom he wants to bid a last farewell, but the friend is late…We leave the poet holding his lute, still alone, but transfixed by the beauty of the world, "the eternal, love-intoxicated world."

The Farewell

The sun departs behind the mountains.
In all the valleys, evening descends
with its cooling shadows.
O look! Like a silver boat,
the moon floats on the blue sky-lake above.
I feel the fine wind wafting
behind the dark spruce.

The brook sings loudly through the darkness.
The flowers stand out palely in the twilight.
The earth breathes, full of peace and sleep,
and all yearning wishes to dream now.
Weary men go home,
to learn in sleep 
 forgotten happiness and youth.
The birds crouch silently in their branches.
The world is asleep!

It blows coolly in the shadows of my spruce.
I stand here and wait for my friend;
I wait to bid him a last farewell.
I yearn, my friend, at your side
to enjoy the beauty of this evening.
Where do you tarry? You leave me alone for so long!
I wander up and down with my lute,
on paths swelling with soft grass.
O beauty! O eternal love - eternal, love-intoxicated world!
Der Abschied
Die Sonne scheidet hinter dem Gebirge.
In alle Täler steigt der Abend nieder
Mit seinen Schatten, die voll Kühlung sind.
O sieh! Wie eine Silberbarke schwebt
Der Mond am blauen Himmelssee herauf.
Ich spüre eines feinen Windes Wehn
Hinter den dunklen Fichten!
Der Bach singt voller Wohllaut durch das Dunkel.
Die Blumen blassen im Dämmerschein.
Die Erde atmet voll von Ruh und Schlaf,
Alle Sehnsucht will nun träumen.
Die müden Menschen gehn heimwärts,
Um im Schlaf vergeßnes Glück
Und Jugend neu zu lernen!
Die Vögel hocken still in ihren Zweigen.
Die Welt schläft ein!
Es wehet kühl im Schatten meiner Fichten.
Ich stehe hier und harre meines Freundes;
Ich harre sein zum letzten Lebewohl.
Ich sehne mich, o Freund, an deiner Seite
Die Schönheit dieses Abends zu genießen.
Wo bleibst du? Du läßt mich lang allein!
Ich wandle auf und nieder mit meiner Laute
Auf Wegen, die vom weichen Grase schwellen.
O Schönheit! O ewigen Liebens - Lebenstrunkne Welt!

					

Magnificat

My days and nights right now are accompanied by Ricardo Reis.* Everything tinged with melancholy, solitude, the loneliness of men needing women to stave off their thoughts of death, and feeling myself quite different but knowing the truth of it for some men, the way they feel death like a chill in their bodies and so it is in the body that they seek comfort.

Yesterday I spent a rare day by myself, and it was as beautiful a day as we ever have here. I began in the garden, as the sun had just come over the fence to open the morning glories, talking to a friend whose husband is in a nursing home. He has Parkinson's, she brought him home the previous night for the evening, she is very strong but her eyes were full of tears as she told me about his decline, his anger, their sadness, and touched just briefly on her own isolation. Who is taking care of you, besides les fleurs, I asked her. Myself, she said, with that kind of smile that shows the warmth behind the stoicism. I have friends. But it is a hard thing to share.

And then I cycled up to the studio, where I am now, past another centre de readaptation where the staff, in white, sat smoking and talking in the sun before their shifts began; past an old woman talking to a squirrel that was eating nuts at the base of a tree.
I'm glad I don't have to face all this quite yet. Surrounded by paints and colors, with fresh coffee, and the piano, I was content

Today, our choir season began. It was good to see everyone,and even better to be making music together again. No melancholy at all. The 4:00 Evensong was devoted to music by the English Romantic composer Charles Villiers Stanford (he was actually Irish by birth), and I'll leave you with this recording of the Magnificat from his Service in C (accompanied by a bizarre and mostly-dreadful collection of paintings of Mary and the annunciation: shut your eyes and listen.)  It is, as you'll hear, what we call "a big sing." As one of only four sopranos in our choir of 25 or so today, I can vouch for that – by the end of the service I felt like I had a had an aerobic workout as well as a vocal one. I'm glad there were two pros on either side of me, better able to belt out one high G after another than I am! But it was fun.

http://www.youtube.com/v/90g_Zm68U-Y?fs=1&hl=en_US

*The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, by Jose Saramago

All That Jazz

We spent the evening of July 4th with friends at the Montreal jazz festival. It was a beautiful summer evening, before the oppressive heat of last week, and perfect for listening to happy outdoor music. As the sun set we heard "Lost Fingers," a popular Montreal group, at the main stage, and then went to sit on the lawn at the blues stage to hear a very good British guitarist and his band. I did this sketch of the first concert while there was still light in the sky, and added the color later when I was back home.

Below is the original sketch. I liked the spontaneity of the original drawing and tried to keep as much of it as I could when working over it with the watercolors. The color does adds some of the excitement of actually being in a big crowd like this. In a fast, small watercolor on non-watercolor paper, you don't have much control at all, and it's hard to convey the luminosity of the lights and the big video monitors that showed closeups of the performers. It would be hard even in oils! But I really enjoyed doing this sketch, as well as being in such a lively place, and hope that shows in the result.

Twelve Days of Christmas

"Twelfth Night" by David Teniers the Younger (1634-40)

Yesterday was officially the twelfth day of Christmas, though we'll be celebrating Epiphany on this coming Sunday, and I guess J. and I will leave our tree up until then. In honor of the actual day, here's an explanation of the origin of that litany of numbered hens and leaping lords we sing about this time of year, which has always puzzled me. I have no idea if this explanation is accurate, but it sounds plausible to me, considering the realities of religious persecution and fear. What amazes me is that the Church of England was really not all that far from Catholicism in its beliefs, and the ideas in this mnemonic cipher, if that's what it was, are not things that were unfamiliar or taboo in Anglicanism. However, as British history (and Irish history down to our own times) reveals, the tension between Catholicism and Protestantism (mainly Anglicanism, the official state religion) was intense and much blood was shed over it; what may have been at stake (a deliberate use of that word) here was the memorization and recitation of a Roman Catholic catechism, something that perpetuated the belief system and the faith among young people and was therefore almost certainly forbidden.

(and no, I haven't searched the internet to find alternate explanations, but would be glad to hear them.)

There is one Christmas Carol that has always baffled me. What in the world do leaping lords, French hens, swimming swans, and especially the partridge who won't come out of the pear tree have to do with Christmas?
This week, I found out.
From 1558 until 1829, Roman Catholics in England were not permitted to practice their faith openly. Someone during that era wrote this carol as a catechism song for young Catholics. It has two levels of meaning: the surface meaning plus a hidden meaning known only to members of their church. Each element in the carol has a code word for a Christian
reality which the children could remember.

1. The partridge in a pear tree was Jesus Christ.
   
2. Two turtle doves were the Old and New Testaments.
   
3. Three French hens stood for faith, hope and love.
   
4. The four calling birds were the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke & John.
   
5. The five golden rings recalled the Torah or Law, the first five books of the Old Testament.
   
6. The six geese a-laying stood for the six days of creation.
   
7. Seven swans a-swimming represented the sevenfold gifts of the Holy Spirit–Prophesy, Serving, Teaching, Exhortation, Contribution, Leadership, and Mercy.
   
8. 
   The eight maids a-milking were the eight beatitudes.
   
9. Nine ladies dancing were the nine fruits of the Holy Spirit–Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness,Goodness,Faithfulness, Gentleness, and Self Control.
   
10. The ten lords a-leaping were the ten commandments.
    
11. The eleven pipers piping stood for the eleven faithful disciples.
    
12. The twelve drummers drumming symbolized the twelve points of belief in the Apostles' Creed.

And here's a bit about Twelfth Night, gleaned mostly from the Wikipedia:

Twelfth Night is a holiday observed on the
evening before the twelfth day of Christmas or the Epiphany celebration,
which commemorates the adoration of the Magi before the infant Jesus.

In Tudor England, the Twelfth Night marked the end of a winter
festival that started on All Hallows Eve (Halloween.) An appointed King or Lord of Misrule governed the Christmas festivities, and the Twelfth Night was the end of his period
of rule. The common theme was that the normal order of things was
reversed; masters waited on their servants, and so forth. This Lord of Misrule tradition can be traced back to
pre-Christian European festivals such as the Celtic festival of Samhain
and the Ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia.

After Twelfth Night the Carnival season starts, which lasts through
Mardi Gras (literally, "Fat Tuesday," the day of feasting and carousing right before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of the fasting season of Lent.) In some places such as New Orleans, the night of
January 6 with the first Carnival celebrations is called Twelfth Night.

In some places, Twelfth Night celebrations include food traditions such as the king cake or tortell. (Note: this is a big tradition in Quebec, as well as in French-inspired New Orleans, where bakeries sell "Gateaux de Roi," special cakes with a prize baked into them. The person who gets the prize hosts the next party.)

The Shakespeare play Twelfth Night, or What You Will was originally written to be performed in celebration of Twelfth Night; its first performance was on February 2, 1602, at the feast of Candlemas which marked the formal end of Christmastide in the liturgical calendar.In many English-speaking countries, it was historically considered bad luck to leave your Christmas decorations up beyond (depending on what source you consult) Epiphany, or Candlemas, which comes 40 days after Christmas. My grandmother always took her tree down the day after Christmas; my own tradition is to leave things up until Epiphany but here in cold, dark Quebec many people leave their decorations up for another month or more! I found it fascinating to read that any edible decorations on wreaths were also consumed on Epiphany, for here they would have been frozen solid for weeks, and completely unfit for food!

A Messiah

Last night I sang Handel's Messiah with a large chorus, chamber orchestra, and top-notch professional soloists at the cathedral. Our regular choir of about 25 people was augmented by members of two other local choirs to a total of about 55 singers. This photo, a composite of two taken by J. with my little camera, shows the conductor, Boris Brott, directing the audience when they stood and joined in the "Hallelujah Chorus." The concert was sold out, and it made me happy to look out at so many faces during the moving journey that this music offers. (The soloists, all of whom who sang brilliantly last night, were Nathalie Paulin, soprano; Daniel Taylor, counter-tenor/alto; Pascal Charbonneau, tenor; and Alexander Dobson, bass — they're in a row behind Brott, joining us for the big chorus.) (I'm partially hidden by the big column, my face is just to the left of it, halfway up in the chorus, above and to the right of that bright light on the music stand.)

I've been thinking, during this season, about the words in the music we sing. On Sunday, before the regular service, Jonathan was at the back of the church when a woman came in and demanded, "Are there going to be Christmas hymns?" He was a little taken aback but showed her the service leaflet and said probably there would be some. "Well, if there aren't going to be Christmas hymns I'm leaving!" she retorted. She was probably a little disturbed, but her transparency seems like it expresses something that lurks beneath the surface in a lot of us. How much of the emotion of this season that's triggered by music is actually about religion, and how much is cultural? I wonder, and suspect most of it is really cultural as well as personal, touching deep memories and awakening expectations that are so complex that it's very hard for us to know what we're feeling and why.

Last night, singing Handel's text, much of it drawn from the prophesies in the book of Isaiah, I noticed all the promises about this "messiah," this "savior who is Christ the Lord." "Wonderful!  Counselor! The Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace." What is this? What are we saying? So many of the Christmas texts speak about peace: peace that will come when Jesus comes again, peace in the manger and under the stars, peace between the lamb and the lion, peace between human beings. And yet for 2000 years people have continued to fight terrible wars, many in the name of religion, and we're no closer to "peace on earth" than we were in Isaiah's time (8th C. B.C.E.) let alone the first century C.E.

Jesus, as a teacher, said much less about peace than he did about justice, particularly economic justice. He certainly spoke about loving one another; it was the author(s) of Isaiah, prophesying Judah's eventual release from Babylonian captivity, who wrote about beating swords into ploughshares. I can only imagine how appalled Jesus would be to see the scene above and hear himself glorified as "The Prince of Peace, King of Kings, and Lord of Lords." But the story and the words seem to touch something in us, some fundamental hope that Christmas, rolling around again in our lives, seems to represent: a hope that things will be better, that the people in our own lives will be kinder to one another, that we'll feel happier and more loved, that we'll find people to love ourselves, that the world will finally wake up. We say we're looking for a Messiah who will fix everything that's wrong in this broken world of ours, but really what we want to find in our lives is genuine love, and a sense that death is not an ending that renders our lives meaningless.

Toward the end of the service I noticed that one of the homeless men who sleep on the cathedral steps had come in and was standing near the back door, wrapped in a long beaten-up coat, a knitted hat still on his head. I was glad he'd been allowed to come in, and hoped there was something in the warmth and beauty of the performance that would ring true, not hollow, for him this season. But who's to say who's the most needy? There were plenty of faces in the audience of well-dressed people wearing a look of sadness mixed with expectation and hope. I often see this as we process out of the church after a service; there's no way to know what's going on in someone's head, or why they've come out on this particular day, or what they hope to find in the words or music or silence. I've been moved to tears by music so many times in my life, and often unexpectedly, that I know how much power it has to touch us and vibrate loose old feelings, new hopes, or pain we've carried for a long time. I was speaking of these things to one of the visiting choristers, a man I'd never met who was also happy to be singing last night, and he said, "Yes, I know exactly what you mean. And it reminds me that musicians do have an important role to play."

Missa ex machina

Our choir year started up with a roar – of jet engines, explosions, city crowds. Sunday morning we sang Robin Davies' "Missa ex machina," a composition he wrote for the cathedral choirs and prepared electronic tape. In the afternoon we performed his Magnificat and Nunc, and in the evening held the first of two recording sessions to put this remarkable music down in digital form.

I'm a bit worn out today, as I'm sure my fellow singers are too – not vocally as much as in my shoulders and neck and legs: lots of hours of standing and concentrating. It was exhilarating to work on this music and then perfect it during the recording sessions, but what I found most remarkable were the comments from parishioners after the morning service. All of the parts of the mass are scored for voices alongside the sounds of urban and modern life, whether those are street sounds, bird calls against traffic, or the sounds of technology, conflict, and stress, skillfully blended with the words of the different parts of the mass. It's impossible to describe this music, and to put it the way I just have is an oversimplification – the music is subtle. In another month, when the CD comes out, you'll be able to hear it… the listeners on Sunday said things like, "I wish we could hear this more often – maybe it could become our cathedral 'signature' mass!" People who never comment on the music at all said how much they appreciated it.

I think what they were responding to was the fact that the music expresses very well how spiritual life often feels to us today, in the midst of a world in great conflict, pulsing with technology and complexity, especially for people trying to maintain a sense of the spiritual in modern, increasingly secular cities. The door to our cathedral, in the absolute center of Montreal's downtown, opens on St. Catherine Street with its traffic, homeless people, constant noise, sex shops and computer stores. Our recording sessions of this piece filled with traffic noises were,
ironically, interrupted many times by local traffic sounds and sirens -
at one point one of our tenors went outside to ask an idling tourist
bus to please turn off its engine or move elsewhere… Literally beneath us lies the underground city, an interconnected subterranean mirror-city filled with restaurants, stores, salons, and kiosks threaded by the subway. When we sing Evensong from the chancel, we look down the central aisle and see McDonald's. The quiet cathedral undercroft, where the choir practices, opens onto an escalator heading down into that vast underground mall. Stepping back and forth between our world of Palestrina and Sanford, and brightly-lit consumerism, concrete and steel, is something we all do without the benefit of transition or interpretation.

So how welcome it is that contemporary composers are taking risks like this, creating post-modern liturgical music that attempts to express something real about the internal and external worlds of our daily habitation. At the conclusion of Davies' mass, the Agnus Dei, that great plea for forgiveness that precedes communion, ("Oh Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world, have mercy upon us…have mercy upon us… grant us thy peace") ends with vague sounds of distant war, and the music never resolves into a platitude, or even, for that matter, anything resembling an answer.

Mostly Not Mozart

Like the author of this article in today's NY Times, I too have harbored a deep-seated resistance to old Wolfgang from my earliest days in music. As a young pianist I played "easy" Mozart – the variations on "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" come to mind immediately and refuse to leave…and as a young flutist I practiced and practiced the Mozart flute concerti in preparation for the dreaded annual NYSSMA competitions, where music students from New York State's high schools performed solo works, scales, and sight-reading for judges who then gave us a score and critical evaluation. I think the terror I felt during those examinations will forever be linked with Mozart in my mind, but that isn't the real reason I disliked his music – it was the repetition, especially (as the Times article notes) in the left hand, and predictability.

Later on in life I discovered Mozart's vocal music – the operas, masses and requiems, the incredible concert arias, and my reaction went in exactly the opposite direction — I fell in love. This split affection continues to this day; I can barely sit through a Mozart piano concerto, but am in raptures when listening to or performing almost any of his works for voice; perhaps it's the difference (she suggests mischievously) between music he wrote to please his father or patrons, and the music he wrote for love.

One or Two Verses

I'm sitting in my Vermont living room, where boxes begin to accumulate below the bookshelves, listening over the internet to my choir in Montreal singing Evensong. The Dean is presiding, and he reads the lessons and prayers, some in English, some in French, and I'm surprised to notice how much more of the French I understand than I used to – somehow it's easier to tell that, listening on the radio rather than from the choir loft, where my attention is understandably distracted by upcoming duties. I listen to the chanted psalms and responses, the motets, a complicated modern rendition of the Magnificat and Nunc; it all sounds good. Finally the organist begins the last hymn. It's the Welsh lullaby most all of us know as "Sleep my child and peace attend thee/ all through the night," but those aren't the words the congregation and choir are singing. I don't know what the words are in the Canadian hymnal. What I hear are not individual words, anyway, but a strong male voice I don't recognize, from one of the front pews; he's a fraction of a beat behind the organ but singing the familiar tune with genuine feeling and pleasure. The whole congregation is a little behind, actually, but by the end of the first verse they've caught up, and the church sounds more full than usual, ordinary voices blending with the choir. "It's so beautiful," I think, as last bars of the simple, unaffected tune make me stop what I'm doing. My hands fall to my lap, and I realize my eyes are suddenly full of tears.